1. Field of the Invention
This invention generally relates to a search inquiry method and, more particularly, to a system and method for contextually searching among a variety of computer data types, using attributes of a visual relationship between search components entered to direct the priority and ordering of a search inquiry submitted to a conventional search engine.
2. Description of the Related Art
Digital information is stored in a variety of locations, formats, and for an individual, is accumulated over a long period of time. A key area of computing, from both user and scientific perspective, is the ability to easily locate and retrieve desired information from a repository. Current technologies allow a number of ways to create search queries, refine results obtained by queries, and eventually succeed on retrieving desired content. However, the user interactions and user experience in conducting searches may be poor, time consuming, and frustrating—especially to non-technically inclined users.
The ability of a computer user to effectively and efficiently conduct a search for digital data materials of interest is limited by a number of factors. Most commonly, a search request involves keyboard entry of words or phrases which are used by a search engine to create links to digital content based on pattern matches or similar comparative criteria. The search engine reporting mechanism returns to the user an ordered list, typically where the first ordering is by ‘relevance’, meaning some quality metric has been applied to weight the ordering according to the number of matches to the request terms.
For search refinement, users may be requested or “walked through” creation of Boolean relational constructs which apply operators and ordering to constrain the search scope. For some types of digital data, such as images, a search may be conducted using the image or regions of the image as exemplary input criteria, and a search engine employs feature extraction and pattern matching on the image data. Images may include metadata such as date and time of acquisition, geolocation data, specifics of acquisition device, digital data format, and possibly keywords as linguistic tags of significance to the pictorial content (e.g., sunset, sailboat, bird, etc.).
To a naïve end user, it is bothersome to generate detailed Boolean algebraic relationships, but necessary due to the usually large number of matches to a brief search query entry of a few words, for example. Refinement of results is often directed—whether in relation to text-bearing content or image-bearing content—as a branching action, by selecting a particular result and an option to ‘find more like this’. Considerable time must be spent in following a branch, and then if the inexact comparison methods provide poor result, additional time in stepping back to a superior branch point for further exploration.
It would be advantageous if a user could initiate a search using a simple and natural query approach, and likewise for refinement, be presented a rapid and intuitive method to narrow to desired outcome.